Digital Pens & iPhones

Vodaphone and Apple this week announced that they will work together to deliver the iPhone into Australia (and 9 other countries). As you can see by their press release, there is not a lot of information. So at this stage it is unknown as to when the iPhone will be available in Australia.

For us, that means that we will start to see more enquiries from people who want to use an iPhone with their digital pen. So where do we stand with the ability to support iPhone when they are released?

As far as we are aware, no one in the Anoto digital pen world has yet developed a router for the iPhone to send the digital forms. The primary reason for this is the lack of numbers of these phones in the market (Steve Jobs goal is to have 10 million iPhones out by years end) combined with the fact that most iPhones are being used in the consumer market, whereas the main digital pen market space is for business.

But, Apple has their sights set on making the iPhone a serious contender to the likes of Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Symbian based phones (all of which have digital pen routers available) by reaching out to corporate users. At a recent event Apple announced the `corporate wishlist’ they working on to help sway decision making in their favour for corporate and business phones. Most notable of these that I think will help with corporate users is the support for Microsoft Exchange. Apple will license ActiveSync to allow access to users corporate e-mail, this combined with the global contacts list and push e-mail will make it a serious contender in the business world.

If (or more likely, when) the business and corporate uptake of the iPhone increases, then we will have cause to write a router for the iPhone - until then it remains a nice toy that I look forward to getting when they are available here in Australia.

Brad